A multimode terminal comprises a receiver, which permits to manage the received signal, whatever the standard of this signal is.
Today, from an RF point of view, the emerging multimode receivers in a terminal are implemented by using as many RF chipsets as there are targeted standards by the terminal. The latest triple band mobile phone GSM/DCS/PCS, which also includes bluetooth standard and FM radio reception, is implemented with three separate chipsets, one for each standard as described in the RFMD UMTS/DCS/GSM chipset document for their RF51176 receiver, for example.
In this kind of architecture, one can understand that the more standards the terminal manages, the more the number of chipsets increases leading to an increase of power consumption, of components and so to great cost, and to a complex architecture.